We as a company spend a lot of time thinking about search engine optimization, or SEO. No small wonder, given that search is at the core of our business.

Of course, there are plenty of other ways to drive traffic to your website. Paid media, social posts, and display advertising are just a few. But, when done well, SEO can provide an important — and cost-effective — strategy for organic growth. In fact, the latest research from web analytics company Parse.ly shows Google Search accounted for around half of external referrals to the publishers in its network this past year.

To really get the most out of SEO, though, it’s important to stay on top of the latest Google Search updates. That’s no different for us internally. We at Google own 7,000 websites that are managed by hundreds of product and marketing teams all over the world. Over 200 changes are made to these websites every single day, all of which could potentially affect a site’s SEO. When it comes to how Google sites appear in Search, they receive the same treatment as any other site on the web, and our teams follow the same external guidelines provided to webmasters. – Read more

Changing your content management system, joining domains, or migrating to a new domain can result in dramatic ranking changes.

These are seven considerations for preserving or improving your rankings before attempting these changes.

1. Site Architecture

A major consideration is how the web pages are organized. The organization of the web pages is usually referred to as the site architecture or the taxonomy. The ideal is to have logical category page structure, with additional sub-categories as needed.

There are two considerations:

Maintain current site architecture to avoid losing rankings

Update a poor site architecture in order to improve rankings

Maintain Site Architecture

To avoid upsetting good rankings, try to maintain current site architecture. This means keeping the same URLs and categories. Those are the two main considerations, assuming that the web pages aren’t changing.

If you need to merge web pages, choose the most popular URL and redirect the old URLs to the new URL. – Read more

Ecommerce is changing. Mobile conversions continue to be on the rise—mobile saw sales increase by 55 percent in 2018, and Forrester predicts that by 2022, smartphones will account for $175.4bn USD in retail sales.

Customer expectations are growing at the same time: 38 percent of shoppers now expect high street businesses to offer same-day delivery.

Other ecommerce trends are very much in line with the web design trends that are pushing the industry forward this year. Progressive web apps, for example, use advanced technologies to bring the speed and features of a mobile app to a mobile website, even allowing for shopping platforms to be accessible offline, points out fashion and beauty ecommerce specialist Mari Corella.

“The key benefit to retailers is that they no longer have to choose between investing in their mobile sites or their apps,” she explains. “Some retailers may even drop their mobile apps entirely in favor of a PWA.” – Read more

It’s often a company’s first impression: a digital introduction to an organization, the problem it tackles, and the solutions it offers. The sophistication of landing pages can vary. Some companies use their homepage as a landing page. Others create specific pages that target discrete customer profiles and move them through a marketing funnel.

Landing pages also take various forms depending on the growth stage of a company. But that’s one of the common missteps that I see: landing pages prioritize the story of the startup, rather than the journey of the customer with the startup.

Landing page copy improves the more customers see themselves in it. Rethink and revise your landing page by building it around three elements. If that’s too much effort and you’re looking for fast fixes, the following tips will improve your current landing page copy. – Read more

Arguably the single best free tool available to marketers is Google Analytics. If you know how to use it, it can tell you so much about your customers, how they are using your website, what they’re interested in, and what is causing them issues.

However, no tool is perfect. And no tool can do everything you need it to. Even something as impactful as Google Analytics must come with a few words of warning.

To get the most out of the tool, you have to first understand what it is telling you. And with a tool as powerful as Google Analytics, the biggest fear is in assuming everyone will read the data in the same way.

One Statistic, Multiple Interpretations

Let’s look at an example:

Your team is reviewing the most popular conversion paths on your website and you find that people landing on one specific page are returning to the previous page at a high rate. This is something that Google Analytics can show you quite clearly. You can see the click paths, and so you know where they are coming from and where they are going next.

It’s obvious, in this case, that there is a problem worth correcting. Something about that page is not working. – Read more

If you’re producing digital content for your website or social media, then you want to know whether it’s working or not! Here’s our run down of metrics that you should be keeping an eye on.

Why do you need to know about digital marketing metrics?

Unlike offline marketing such as adverts and flyers, digital marketing offers businesses a plethora of in-depth insights into how effective their marketing efforts really are. With every post, like, share, follow or comment data is created that you can use to extend your reach and increase engagement with your brand.

Whether you’re looking to grow your business through organic or paid digital marketing there are a number of key metrics that you really need to know. In this post we’ll be looking at metrics that you can access for free, either via your social channels or via Google Analytics, and because they’re free, there’s no excuse not to be using them!

Website and behaviour

This section looks at how people are behaving on your website. All the information that you need can be found in Google Analytics, if you don’t already have an account set up, make your way over there now and get it done.

Page views

The total number of views a single page has had for any given time period. It’s a pretty basic stat but useful all the same as you can measure/ compare how your pages rank against each other.

If you find a page that stands out as particularly high ranking, or indeed low ranking, it can be an indicator to have a look at what might be working well, or not so well.

For years marketers have been promised that technologies like programmatic will unlock efficiencies, freeing them up to focus on more creative work. Google’s Michael Bailey explains how his team is making that promise a reality.

Back in 1930, the economist John Maynard Keynes made a bold prediction for the not-so-distant future: thanks to technological advancements and the resulting productivity gains, we’d all be working 15 hours a week. Almost 90 years later, the average American is working more than double those hours.

Does that sound familiar to any marketers? For years now, we’ve been told that marketing automation technologies like programmatic will unlock efficiencies, freeing us up to focus on more creative work. That vision has also yet to materialize.

So a short while back, my colleagues and I at the Google Media Lab — the team that manages the media strategy for Google’s advertising campaigns — laid out and started enacting a plan that we think will make that vision a reality. – Read More

If you’re looking to gather leads for your business, you need to have a landing-page strategy. Like every other marketing tactic, this can be done well or it can be done poorly. To see the greatest return on their investment, businesses need to build effective landing pages, then test and optimize them to maximize conversion rates. – Read more

Take notice, Google is testing a more prominent look for the messaging feature in the local search results. Is your business ready to manage text messages from your customers?

Google is testing a bigger push for the messaging option within the local panel. Google launched messaging within Google My Business in July 2017. Google is now testing a way to promote messaging more to searchers in the local panel by using a larger message button.

What it looks like. Local SEO and Search Engine Land columnist Joy Hawkins posted a screen shot on Twitter of the test. – Read more

A marketer relies on AdWords conversion tracking to optimize the performance.

Trying to make the best possible decision for AdWords conversions the majority of the people stuck their heads arguing about low performing keywords with the clients. At the end the decision based on conversion data that is inside Google Analytics. For making it easier, some people switched to AdWords conversion in Google Analytics.

When a conversion triggered from AdWords, it might take up to 24 hours to show it up in Google Analytics. However, if some import goals in google conversion it can take up to 24-72 hours. This first step is to point out all the errors; the next is to eliminate those errors by using error-killing tools for google analytics mistakes.

The AdWords conversion in google analytics might take a day or two to show up properly in google analytics.This can be a bit difficult if you might have more than transactions. The best way to setup, an Ad word is to link a google analytics goal to Ad Word as a conversion. Then the next step is to confirm that if tracking is working properly for Google Analytics or not.

For having a check on it, a person visited your website from an Ad came back in 30 days period, this conversion recorded in AdWords on the day when a person first clicked on the link. Moreover, it depends on how you set goals in analytics you might be able to see it on an actualday. – Read more